You are spot on in your observations as usual! Unfortunately, the reality is that, similar to technology, information/knowledge and the design of interfaces for manipulating information that leads to knowledge creation/learning, is a function of: 1) trying to meet the lowest common denominator (we all work in different ways and have different needs), 2) the most scalability (the most bang for the buck), and 3) for the least amount of short and long-term costs (delivering proactive, point of need service gets unavoidably, exponentially costly in terms of personnel, workload and just plain funding as the quality goes up).

I believe this is true for any organization or business, and is why business models, which have been evolving for thousands of years, still more often than not fail so miserably at customer service.

Of course libraries and library services and systems are especially bad at this stuff and we librarians do need to improve our service and knowledge facilitation (to steal from R. David Lankes SUNYLA keynote) design models quickly across the board if we want to remain relevant (and employed).

Just my three cents.
Dana

]]>By: Lisahttps://deepening.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/do-libraries-make-people-feel-like-this/#comment-253
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:10:27 +0000http://deepening.wordpress.com/?p=154#comment-253I believe the answer to all of your questions is YES. Except perhaps the first point. Proceed as planned given response. I’ve always thought that information literacy instruction could succeed far better if we didn’t have to spend so much time either (1) explaining how the tools work, (2) explaining how they DON’T work, and (3) teaching people to act in non-intuitive ways to get them to work at least partially. Hmmm… am I grumpt this morning?
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